after spending months in an iron lung,
has limited mobility, and lives alone. He
had friends who were already sick with
the coronavirus, and he knew that he
should stay inside. Not long after he saw
the Facebook post, a friend phoned him
and said, “James, call this number. They’ll
get your food.” He left Bed-Stuy Strong
a voice mail, and someone called him
back a few hours later. The next day, a
volunteer arrived in his lobby with three
bags of groceries. “I looked at everything
and was like a kid at Christmas,” he told
me. (He described himself as a “halfway
decent cook,” with special skills in the
chili arena.) Lipscomb is a longtime
member of the Bed-Stuy chapter of Lions
Club International, the first black chap-
ter in New York State. He told the club
members about his experience, and the
club donated two hundred dollars to
Bed-Stuy Strong. He also went back to
the person who had written the skepti-
cal Facebook post, he told me. “And I
said, ‘Look, this group is the best-kept
secret going now!’ ”
When I first spoke with Mathews,
she quickly pointed out that other local
groups—such as Equality for Flatbush,
which organizes against unjust policing
and housing displacement—had been
“doing the work for much longer.” She
told me that she didn’t want to raise her
hand and say, “Look, we’re new, we’re
so shiny, we’re on Slack!” The organi-
zation’s strictly local focus reflects a prin-
ciple of many mutual-aid groups: that
neighbors are best situated to help neigh-
bors. Ocasio-Cortez’s team, after the
conference call, distributed a guide
hashtagged #WeGotOurBlock, with in-
structions for building a neighborhood
“pod” by starting with groups of five to
twenty people, drawing on ideas popu-
larized by the Bay Area Transformative
Justice Collective. The idea of “pod-map-
ping,” according to one of the group’s
founders, Mia Mingus, is to build last-
ing networks of support, rather than in-
dulge in “fantasies of a giant, magical
community response, filled with people
we only had surface relationships with.”
Mingus, a disability activist who was
born in Korea and brought up by a white
couple in the U.S. Virgin Islands, told
me that she’d been spending her days
checking in on her pod, dropping off
food and supplies for people, and her
nights reading articles about layoffs and
hospitalizations and new mutual-aid
groups. She felt, she said, like the earth
was moving beneath her feet. More peo-
ple were recognizing that the problems
Americans were facing weren’t caused
just by the virus but by a health-care
system that ties insurance to employ-
ment and a minimum wage so low that
essential workers can’t save for the emer-
gencies through which they will be asked
to sustain the rest of the country. She’d
learned, after years of organizing, that,
in some ways, people are attracted to
crisis—to letting problems escalate until
they’re forced to spring into action. “Pods
give us the structure to deal with smaller
harms,” she said. “And we have to deal
with smaller harms, or this is where we
end up.”
Mathews told me that Bed-Stuy
Strong was trying to plan for coming
hardships that the government would
also probably fail to adequately address.
Unemployment would skyrocket in the
neighborhood, and community needs
would evolve. She is committed to the
chaos of collective decision-making; the
group’s discussions about operations and
priorities happen publicly, with input
from anyone who wants to contribute.
There are no eligibility criteria for gro-
cery recipients, other than Bed-Stuy res-idency. (A distinctive quality of mutual
aid, in general contrast with charity and
state services, is the absence of condi-
tions for those who wish to receive help.)
Jackson Fratesi, a friend of mine in
the neighborhood who used to oversee
last-mile delivery operations for Walmart
stores in New York and now helps run
logistics for Bed-Stuy Strong, said, “We
have guesses about what community
needs will be in the future, but we also
know that some of these needs will
blindside us, and we’re trying to pre-
pare for that.” He added, “And—who
knows?—maybe one of the things we’ll
be blindsided by is the government ac-
tually doing a good job.”
In her book “Good Neighbors: The
Democracy of Everyday Life in Amer-
ica,” the Harvard political scientist
Nancy L. Rosenblum considers the
American fondness for acts of neigh-
borly aid and coöperation, both in or-
dinary times, as with the pioneer prac-
tice of barn raising, and in periods of
crisis. In Rosenblum’s view, “there is lit-
tle evidence that disaster generates an
appetite for permanent, energetic civic
engagement.” On the contrary, “when
government and politics disappear from
view as they do, we are left with the
not-so-innocuous fantasy of ungoverned“ You can’t just shout ‘Turn left!’ halfway through the intersection.”